Genealogies of Environmentalism: The Lost Works of Clarence Glacken

By Clarence Glacken, S. Ravi Rajan, Adam Romero and Michael Watts

Clarence Glacken wrote one of the most important books on environmental issues published in the twentieth century. His magnum opus, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, first published in 1967, details the ways in which perceptions of the natural environment have profoundly influenced human enterprise over the centuries while, conversely, permitting humans to radically alter the Earth. Although Glacken did not publish a comparable book before his death in 1989, he did write a follow-up collection of essays—lost works now compiled at last in Genealogies of Environmentalism.

This new volume comprises all of Glacken's unpublished writings to follow Traces and covers a broad temporal and geographic canvas, spanning the globe from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Each essay offers a brief intellectual biography of an important environmental thinker and addresses questions such as how many people the Earth can hold, what resources can sustain such populations, and where land for growth is located. This collection—carefully edited and annotated, and organized chronologically—will prove both a classic text and a springboard for further discussions on the history of environmental thought.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Jul 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9780813939094

Book preview

Foreword

Large related bodies of thought thus appear, at first like distant riders stirring up modest dust clouds, who, when they arrive, reproach one for his slowness in recognizing their numbers, strength and vitality.

—Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore

By some strange twist of fate, I occupy Clarence Glacken’s old office in the Department of Geography on the fifth floor of the McCone Building on the Berkeley campus. Glacken’s old office faces east, looking up into the Berkeley hills and beyond, to the eucalyptus near the Lawrence Hall of Science. I came to Berkeley in the fall of 1979. Glacken was then retired—he had stepped down from full-time teaching following a heart attack in 1974—but was still active, working assiduously every day on the sequel to Traces on the Rhodian Shore. Clarence was a striking figure: tall and ramrod straight, with, at that point in his life, long gray hair, often pulled back into a ponytail. He was neither physically nor intellectually imposing: quite the contrary, he was quiet and sensitive. Modesty seemed to me to be his distinguishing trait. Clarence always seemed to me a model of Old World gentility; he was gentle to a fault.

Clarence James Glacken (1909–89) was a third-generation Sacramentan. His paternal grandmother had moved to the city in a covered wagon as an infant in 1854, and both grandfathers settled in the city during the 1870s. His parents were Sacramento natives, born and raised downtown. Growing up at 1830 T Street with his younger brother, Glacken counted among his immediate family his mother (his parents had divorced during World War I), an uncle, and maternal grandparents.¹ In his own account, Glacken’s historical and geographic sensibility was forged in northern California. It was the gold rush, the Central Pacific Railroad, and the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers—and his stamp collection!—that sparked his passion for landscape and their deep histories. Looking back in later life on the earliest years, he said, One must be careful to avoid a teleological view . . . there were, however, several interests in early life which I later perceived to be geographical and historical. Sacramento . . . is an historic city, perhaps not by Old World standards, but certainly by American ones.²

Glacken attended Sacramento Junior College for two years, where he was encouraged by his English instructor to study with the great historian Frederick Teggart at the University of California, Berkeley. It was Teggart who became—and in many senses remained—the towering intellectual figure in Glacken’s life. In his first year, in addition to a course on the politics and history of the Far East, Glacken enrolled in Teggart’s course, The Idea of Progress. The undergraduate class dealt with cyclical theories and myths of the golden age in the ancient world, with providential interpretations of history in the Middle Ages, and with the idea of progress in the modern era. Teggart (1870–1946) had begun his career as a librarian and archivist, examining the problems of cataloguing ancient libraries and working on specialized bibliographies on railways, oil, forests, or Victorian poetry. In 1916 he published a book on the relationship of history to other branches of knowledge (Prolegomena to History: The Relation of History to Literature, Philosophy and Science, University of California Press, 1916), and two years later he published The Processes of History (Yale University Press, 1918). By the time Glacken appeared in his class it was the idea of progress that compelled him. During his years at Berkeley, Glacken had no time for anyone but for Teggart, who was a revelation. Alfred L. Kroeber and Robert H. Lowie—two other towering figures on campus—and Carl O. Sauer were not part of his intellectual formation. Glacken was aware of Sauer, but his sole interest lay in Teggart. He devoted himself almost exclusively to the study of the history of ideas: certainly to the ideas of Teggart himself, but also to those of the likes of Arthur Burtt and his book, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1925), and the scholarship of John Livingston Jones on the English poet Coleridge. Glacken received his undergraduate degree with highest honors in 1930 and his master’s degree in 1931, both from the Teggart-chaired Department of Social Institutions, an innovative and unusual program that long preceded other much-heralded multidisciplinary initiatives, such as Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, which were to appear after World War II.

Under Teggart’s tutelage, Glacken did not, of course, escape geographic ideas. Among the teachers in the Department of Social Institutions was a young assistant, Margaret Hodgen (1990–77), who at the time was working on the history of anthropology and the dynamics of social change. Through her class, Glacken deepened his understanding of not just the anthropology classics but also the history of environmental ideas, including works by French geographers and the American geographer Ellsworth Huntington. Hodgen was part of an anthropological community in which the relations between the discipline, space, and environment—one thinks of culture areas and the early iterations of what was to become cultural ecology—were developing apace in and around Kroeber and Sauer. Yet none of this seemed to push Glacken toward geography.

Glacken’s route back to Berkeley as a faculty member traced a circuitous, two-decade-long circumambulation of the globe. Glacken’s graduation from Berkeley launched him into what he called the bleak years of the Great Depression. In the five years following his departure from Berkeley, Glacken worked for the newly established Farm Security Administration (FSA), reporting on migrant labor camp conditions throughout the state of California, from Redding to Bakersfield. With the savings he could muster from his FSA position, in 1937 Glacken traveled from San Francisco to Japan, then to China, Indochina, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and Europe.³ Without this species of fieldwork, Glacken once claimed, he would neither have come to grasp the full meanings of cultural difference nor have been able to move beyond a world of abstractions.

In 1941, three months after his first wife died, Glacken was drafted into the army and served for six years. During his service he married Mildred Mosher, who was an assistant to the influential Malthusian ecologist William Vogt, author of the bestseller Road to Survival (1948) and associate director of the Division of Science and Education of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. Following Japan’s surrender and the emergence of a northeast arc strategy, the U.S. government quickly recruited and trained specialists in Japan and Korea to staff management positions in those territories, and Glacken was selected as an officer-student for training in Japanese affairs at the Civil Affairs Training School, which had been formed at the University of Chicago and was directed by the anthropologist Fred Eggan. He studied Japanese, and his teachers included prominent orientalists, among them John Embree. Subsequently Glacken was sent by the army to Korea, where he acted as director of the Office of Health and Welfare in the military government and subsequently with the Veterans Administration.⁴

At the age of forty, Glacken entered the Isaiah Bowman School of Geography at Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation, The Idea of the Habitable World, examined how the history of ideas could be drawn on to reframe contemporary debates about population growth and natural resources. As soon as he had completed his PhD, in 1951 (in record time), he was appointed to a short-term position to conduct an ethnographic study of Okinawa for the Pacific Science Board of the National Research Council. He studied three villages in Okinawa, focusing on the family system, land tenure, and the impact of land tenure on the organization of space. This work resulted in a book, The Great Loochoo (1956). After returning to his family in California, he visited Carl Sauer (how and why this transpired is unclear), who promptly offered him a position at Berkeley in the fall of 1952.

In some respects, much of what passed as the Berkeley school in the 1950s was clearly orthogonal to the sorts of questions in which Glacken was interested. Glacken respected Sauer (and vice versa), but it is not clear that they were close, and they certainly had very different personalities.⁵ Yet Glacken arrived at a propitious moment in Sauer’s own intellectual evolution. He had become despondent about much of what passed as American geography and about the emerging spatial revolution. Sauer took pride on being on the West Coast, remote from the mid-western and northeastern centers of academic geography, which he found repellent and considered second rate. Not least, his deep skepticism about much of what passed for development converged with a growing and wide-ranging set of concerns that he had come to appreciate (shaped by the likes of Lewis Mumford, Kenneth Boulding, Edgar Anderson, and others) on the state of the Earth. Here Sauer drew Glacken into the famous 1955 international symposium at Princeton University, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (organized by Sauer, Marston Bates, and Lewis Mumford), the first academic conference on anthropogenic environmental change, seven years prior to the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and fifteen years before the first Earth Day. At that conference, Glacken presented a paper on the changing ideas about the living world, summarizing some themes of his doctoral thesis even as he clarified his own trio of ideas, which were to become the backbone of Traces: the idea of a divinely designed Earth (both ecological theory and the intelligent design argument are direct descendants), the idea of environmental influence on people, and the idea of human influence on the environment. This exposure and the clear political implications of examining the dramatic human impact on the Earth—the forerunner, in short, of what we now call the Anthropocene—drew Glacken further into the emerging environmentalism of the late 1950s and 1960s. Other invitations followed: to a 1961 conference at the Pacific Science Congress organized by Ray Forsberg and titled The Role of Men in Island Ecosystems, and to another, in April 1965, organized by F. Fraser Darling and John Milton and titled The Future Environment of North America.

From the time of his arrival at Berkeley, Glacken was inevitably caught up in and reluctantly drawn into this nascent environmentalism. It had the effect of promoting and endorsing his sophisticated historical approach to human transformations of the Earth, while all the time expanding the scope of his project. Glacken’s colleague, David Hooson, wrote that Traces "was originally planned as an introductory chapter to a major work on these themes in 19th and 20th century thought. . . . [Traces], however, stands on its own as one of the most scholarly books written by a geographer, or by a historian of ideas, in this century."⁶ That introductory chapter finally checked in at more than 700 pages. At the same time that he was writing Traces, Glacken was simultaneously researching environmental thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and actually began writing the sequel as soon as Traces went to press. Paradoxically, Glacken himself was not a political creature. He shied away from the political implications of his scholarship. Yet within a decade of his return to Berkeley he was projected into politics of a most fearsome sort in the 1960s, and in many respects it destroyed him.

In keeping with the pace and rhythm of Glacken’s entire life, Traces had a slow gestation, appearing fifteen years after he took up his Berkeley appointment (and three years after he was awarded tenure). It was, of course, widely acclaimed, but did not sell terribly well. Its intellectual capaciousness and erudition aside, Traces was a tough read for the uninitiated. The book clearly bears the imprint of an earlier intellectual generation, of Arthur O. Lovejoy, Louis B. Wright, J. Shapiro Salwyn, and Glacken’s own teacher, Frederick J. Teggart. In this sense the book was somewhat unfashionable. Its theoretical referents are quite out of keeping with the sorts of approaches to the sociology of knowledge production and conceptual history that were to come later.⁷

The 1960s turned out to be a bittersweet period in Glacken’s life. He was now tenured (at the ripe old age of fifty-five), had become chair of the department, had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and had gradually built up a raft of courses (on ideas about nature, and on cultural landscapes) capable of the same sort of appeal as the courses taught by his old teacher, Teggart. Perhaps most important for Glacken’s own scholarship, he now had as a colleague Paul Wheatley, newly arrived from Cambridge University, a person who could match him step for step as a multilingual and cross-cultural intellect of the highest rank. Wheatley was an extraordinary figure⁸—a student of H. C. Darby at Cambridge, he left Berkeley in 1969 to return to University College London, then promptly moved to the University of Chicago, where he chaired the famed Committee on Social Thought—and he and Glacken jointly taught much-lauded courses on Asia. Both Glacken and Wheatley were exceptionally gifted teachers, if very different in style and temperament, and their courses became legendary. The future looked rosy.

But it was not to be. Glacken’s professional success coincided with a period of intense political turmoil, both within the field of geography (the spatial and quantitative revolution was a major assault on everything the Berkeley school stood for) and on the Berkeley campus. As the United States descended into the nightmare of Vietnam, the campus exploded in acrimony and anger over American empire, and the academy became politicized (and contentious) in ways that made the 1964 free speech movement seem calm by comparison. Protests, occupations, police violence, and hostility expressed toward the campus by Ronald Reagan as he assumed the governorship of the state made the university close to ungovernable. It fell to Glacken, whose personality was ill suited for coping with, much less managing, the battles raging within his department and on campus, to be departmental chair during this period. Two years of struggling with escalating faculty rivalry and student protests took their toll. Glacken had a nervous breakdown in the spring of 1970 and a physical breakdown the following fall. Following a six-month leave of absence, Glacken resumed his duties and showed signs of slow recuperation over the next few years, but the path to normalcy was tortuous.

When I arrived in 1979, Clarence was in fine fettle. I vividly recall that during one of our regular Sunday discussions he asked me what I was writing about. I gave a terse, deliberately vague response. The triviality of whatever it was I was working on seemed too painful to rehearse. Why don’t you give me something to read?, he said. We can talk about it next week. Reluctantly, I handed over some bromide, hoping against odds that Clarence would forget about it. But sure enough, the following week he came by my office—barely larger than a broom closet, though with a magnificent view of the Bay—to talk. In his characteristically generous way, he sang the praises of my work—the style, the argument, the sensitivity to history were first class—all delivered with Clarence’s customary gentleness. Then there was silence. A long silence. But, he said finally, we have known this for about a thousand years.

In 1982, as far as it is possible to reconstruct, Clarence delivered the sequel to Traces, some two thousand pages long, to the University of California Press. From here on the story is confused and incomplete. The manuscript appears to have landed on a junior editor’s desk, and by whatever strange sequence of events—it is not even clear that the manuscript was sent out for review, nor, apparently, was a Xerox copy made by the press—the manuscript was returned. There is no record of what exactly transpired and what message was delivered to Clarence. Was it simply a question of length and of cutting it down? Was the book simply out of fashion—and outside the prevailing market model of short, commercially oriented books? What we do know is that it was personally devastating for Clarence. Once more Glacken descended into a period of great darkness. Only later did it come to light that he had apparently destroyed all remaining copies of the manuscript.

Glacken’s own psychological and emotional deterioration in the wake of the manuscript’s completion is deeply saddening. Mildred, his second wife, had died of a stroke in 1980. Her passing represented a terrible loss, for obvious reasons, and the removal of a key anchor in his life. By the mid-1980s he was clearly unwell and had come to doubt the value of his entire corpus.

Almost a half century after its publication, Traces on the Rhodian Shore remains a towering achievement, and Glacken’s scholarship seems more relevant than ever if we are to place the Anthropocene on a larger landscape of the history of human ideas and practice. I can do no better than conclude with a quotation from Corinna Fish’s hommage to Glacken, published, appropriately, in the Sacramento Bee: The ideological and intellectual parameters of contemporary debates, from anthropogenic climate change to fracking, can be traced directly to the three ideas Glacken recognized and analyzed like no other scholar before or since.

Michael J. Watts

1. An excellent short biography was published by Corinna Fish, a former Berkeley geographer, in the Sacramento Bee, January 30, 2012 (http://sacramentopress.com/2012/01/30/traces-of-a-native-son-searching-for-clarence-glacken/).

2. All quotations from Glacken are taken from his A Late Arrival in Academia, in The Practice of Geography, ed. Anne Buttimer, 20–34 (London: Longmans, 1983). Other useful references are Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); idem, Man against Nature: An Outmoded Concept, in The Environmental Crisis, ed. H. W. Helrich, Jr., 127–42. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970; repr., Warner Modula Publications, 1972); and idem, Man and Nature in Recent Western Thought, in This Little Planet, ed. Michael Hamilton, 163–201 (New York: Scribner’s, 1970).

3. David Hooson, In Memoriam: Clarence Glacken 1909–1989, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81, no. 1 (1991): 152–58.

4. Anne Macpherson, Clarence James Glacken 1909–1989, in Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, ed. Geoffrey J. Martin, 27–42 (London: Mansell, 1992).

5. M. Williams, D. Lowenthal and W. Denevan, To Pass On a Good Earth (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).

6. Hooson, In Memoriam: Clarence Glacken, 156.

7. Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Oxford University Press, 1976).

8. Paul Wheatley. Pivot of the Four Quarters (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1972); idem, The Places Where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands, Seventh through the Tenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

Preface

Clarence Glacken’s Traces on the Rhodian Shore is a classic in the history of geographic and environmental ideas. First published in 1967, it remains in print today, almost fifty years later. Glacken wrote a number of other papers, but for some reason, about which there is more speculation than hard fact, he never published the sequel to Traces, although many independent accounts confirm that such a sequel once existed in its entirety.

About two decades ago, while working in the archives at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, I stumbled upon a neatly handwritten manuscript that, barring footnotes, appeared quite complete. Further research indicated that this was not Glacken’s much vaunted sequel but a totally different book manuscript, one he had proposed to publishers in the aftermath of the publication of Traces. Subsequently some of Glacken’s colleagues, notably Professors David Hooson and David Stoddart, shared printed draft papers that Glacken had given them. In the following years I conversed with a number of his former students and colleagues in a bid to learn more about Glacken and his works since the publication of Traces. During this period I was extremely fortunate to enjoy the support of Professor Michael Watts, who also provided many valuable leads. Together, we decided to find a way to publish what remained of Glacken’s lost works.

Finding a publisher proved difficult, given the tight budgetary times and the consequent reluctance on the part of publishers to take on edited works. I therefore decided to approach this project differently and produce the book as a coherent whole, rather than a disparate collection of essays. Here I have made a conscious editorial choice. As an organizing principle, I decided to follow a historical chronology, interspersing essays from both sources, the printed papers that Stoddart and Hooson gave me with those from the handwritten manuscript. In essence, all essays, representing key thinkers and their writings, are arranged by the dates that the protagonists lived and worked. The result is this book, which carries forward the key themes from Traces into the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

Even while I was shopping the book around to potential publishers, Adam Romero, then a brilliant graduate student in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley, had independently developed an interest in Glacken. We decided to collaborate, and in the ensuing months, Adam painstakingly typed out the entire handwritten manuscript, carefully checking his typescript against the original source. But for his herculean effort, this book would not have been possible. Last year the project finally acquired momentum. The University of Virginia Press decided to acquire it, and has been an enthusiastic backer.

Editing the manuscript for publication, however, required considerable effort. Because both sources, the handwritten manuscript and the typescript, were drafts, many passages lacked coherence. There were no footnotes in the handwritten script, and in the draft papers he shared with Hooson and Stoddart, the notes were often incomplete and in many instances inaccurate. Many historical figures were mentioned in the text, but without any indication of who they were. There were also a number of key concepts that were not defined or explained. None of this was Glacken’s fault, for these were but first drafts. In approaching the editorial task, I adopted three central principles: fidelity to the original texts, readability and coherence, and adequate footnoting to assist the reader. Accordingly, I have removed several passages that appeared not to make sense. I also cut or paraphrased many large quotations. Glacken, in these first drafts, had many such quotations, some several pages long, and he very likely intended to edit them himself at a later stage. In editing the lengthy quotations my goal was to be least disruptive, to retain the parts that added value to his argument while removing those that were repetitive. I also tried my best to verify Glacken’s sources. Here I have only partially succeeded. There remain some quotations, especially in languages I do not read, that I could not find an exact page reference to, although in most instances I have managed to locate Glacken’s source. Next, for every name that Glacken mentions, I have provided a brief biographical statement to explain who the person was. Likewise, for every keyword or concept I have ensured there is at least a brief definition. Last but by no means least, since Glacken did not provide introductions to the draft essays, I wrote an editor’s introduction for each essay, summarizing the key themes. There is also an introduction to the volume at large.

One important caveat is in order here. This book contains only Glacken’s unpublished work. There are other works, published as journal articles or book chapters, that could have rounded out the content even more and made the chronology more complete. There was therefore a definite case for including this material. However, there was also a trade-off. Given the word limit agreed to with the publisher and the already generous length of the entire selection, I had to choose either to augment the text by adding footnotes to substantiate the text in the manner described earlier or leave it as it was and include more content. In the end, I decided to adopt the former strategy, in a bid to make this book more useful and leave a more lasting legacy. However, for interested readers, a bibliography of Glacken’s publications is provided at the end of the book.

This project would not have been possible without the assistance of several people. Without doubt, my two collaborators have been critical to the project. Adam Romero was painstaking in transcribing the handwritten manuscript and subsequently reading through and editing the draft, and Michael Watts, an immense source of strength and support. This book would also never have seen the light of day but for David Hooson. It was his kindness, generosity, and good humor, as well as his countless stories about Glacken, that convinced me in the first instance that this project needed to be undertaken. I am also immensely thankful to David Stoddart for preserving the papers that Glacken gave him and allowing us to use them here. Thanks are owed to many other of Glacken’s colleagues and students. Among them are Carolyn Cartier, who shared Clarence Glacken’s course readers, and James Parsons, Alan Pred, Richard Walker, Victor Savage, Diana Davis, Kären Wigen, Martin Lewis, James Sideway, and Terry Burke. I am extremely grateful to the staff and faculty of the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley and to the librarians and archivists of the Bancroft Library. Last but not least, the world owes a huge debt of gratitude to Mary Elizabeth Braun of Oregon State University Press, a geographer herself, for recommending publication to her colleagues at the University of Virginia Press; to two amazingly insightful editors there, Boyd Zenner and Ellen Satrom; to the thorough and often insightful copy editor, Marjorie Pannell; and to the three referees the press sent the manuscript to for review. That said, any mistakes here are entirely mine.

S. Ravi Rajan

Introduction

Long before environmental history existed as a scholarly field of inquiry, a geographer at Berkeley wrote a book that would come to be one of its foundational texts. In 1967, Clarence Glacken published Traces on the Rhodian Shore, a big history of ideas about the environment from antiquity to the eighteenth century.¹ The breadth of scholarship and the scope of the book were breathtaking, its erudition and command of the history of ideas without peer.

The book initially received mixed reviews. For the most part, the detractors were disciplinary practitioners who questioned either a detail or the method from the standpoint of their fields. On the other hand, many scholars praised Traces for providing a complex intellectual history that demanded multidisciplinary and multilingual expertise. By the time the paperback edition arrived, any debate about its place in the pantheon of great books in environmental history had been put to rest. A reviewer in the journal Professional Geographer, for example, called it one of the best and most important books published by a geographer in the English-speaking world in the last hundred years, and one for the American Anthropologist wrote that a book such as this rarely appears anymore.² Today, Traces is essential reading for anyone interested in environmental ideas and their history. As J. R. McNeil, past president of the American Society for Environmental History, put it, "For the Western intellectual tradition up to the eighteenth century, the most comprehensive and insightful text remains Clarence Glacken’s Traces on the Rhodian Shore."³

For the benefit of readers who might not have encountered Clarence Glacken before, it might be useful to sketch a brief biography. Glacken was a third-generation Sacramentan, born in the city in 1909. He was the son of two California families. His paternal grandmother migrated to California in a covered wagon as an infant in 1854; his maternal grandmother was born in Sheldon (near Elk Grove) in 1865.⁴ Both grandfathers had settled in the state by the 1870s, and both his parents were born and raised in downtown Sacramento. As a child, he was enthralled, as many children are, by philately and the mystique of stamps from far-off places. In a 1983 autobiographical essay, Glacken characterized his California upbringing as central to the interests he developed in Traces: Looking back in later life on the earliest years, one must be careful to avoid a teleological view. . . . There were, however, several interests in early life which I later perceived to be geographical and historical. Sacramento . . . is an historic city, perhaps not by Old World standards, but certainly by American ones.⁵ In this account it was the gold rush, streetcars, the Central Pacific Railroad, the State Capitol, and the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers that triggered his passion in the intersection of geography and history. By high school, Glacken had developed a strong interest in geography, and this interest was harnessed by a young English teacher named John Harold Swan, who had recently graduated from Berkeley.

Glacken attended Sacramento Junior College, now Sacramento City College, for two years, before transferring to UC Berkeley. On Swann’s recommendation, he decided to study in a department named Social Institutions, which had been founded by the historian Frederick Teggart. The latter was an autodidactic Irish scholar who wrote Rome and China, one of the first books in the field that is known today as world history.⁶ Glacken was greatly influenced by a yearlong lecture course taught by Teggart. It was an encyclopedic course, covering human history, demography, psychology, historical geography, and the methods of the social sciences. (Another formative figure for early Glacken was Margaret Hodson, who lectured on the history of social thought and social theory and introduced him to the possibilist tradition in geographic thought.) For Glacken, the Teggart course was eye-opening: Teggart’s course, The Idea of Progress . . . was a revelation, because I then realized the importance of the history of ideas. . . . I have often been asked whether in these undergraduate years I took any geography courses. I did not. I had heard of Carl Sauer [Glacken’s future boss], but I had no time for anybody but Teggart.⁷

Glacken received his bachelor’s degree with highest honors in 1930 and his master’s degree in 1931, both from the Department of Social Institutions. By this time he was fluent in German, French, and Spanish, and well versed in the classical languages as well. Over the course of his career he learned Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Japanese.

The years after he graduated did not afford many opportunities for a young graduate from a fledgling program called Social Institutions. The Great Depression obviously limited his options. By his own account, the early 1930s were bleak years for young people.⁸ Given the absence of scholarships, Glacken joined the Farm Security Administration, set up during the first Rooseveltian government. After years on the road conducting surveys in refugee camps from Redding to Bakersfield, Glacken resigned in 1937 and embarked on a world tour. As he put it, In retrospect, I look upon my travels as a species of field work. . . . I do not think I would have ever developed my intense enthusiasm for the history of ideas without it. It would have been a world of abstractions.⁹ Following his global tour, he returned to the Farm Security Administration for an additional four years. In the introduction to Traces, he wrote, The early stimulus to study these ideas came also from personal experience. . . . As I worked with resident and transient families on relief, with migratory farm workers who had come from the Dust Bowl, I became aware . . . of the interrelationships existing between the Depression, soil erosion, and the vast migration to California.¹⁰ He was drafted into the army in 1941, after the death of his first wife, and served in the